Well, after tackling bouts of flu, ear infections and sinus infections (mine and the children's), I am back again after a long break. To pick up the thread of my favorite expat blogs from India, here are another few that I enjoy reading daily. They are in no particular order or ranking, just a sampling of my daily reading that keeps me connected to other perspectives. Sadly, there are few blogs from my hometown, Kolkatta, so I won't put those here. Anyway, here goes.
Cynthia Haller is a twenty-something Swiss woman married to a north Indian man and they both make their home in Bangalore, Karnataka, in south India. I found Cynthia via ivillage, a website to which one of my friends directed me saying that it was "fun, light reading." Anyway, that's where I first encountered Cynthia who is very active in the online message boards section. She writes of her life in Bangalore, the trials and tribulations of being a white woman in the city, her personal sorrows of being accepted/rejected by neighbors and in-laws, being ripped off by price-gouging autorickshaw drivers, missing cheeses (poor thing, if I were Swiss relocated to India, cheese would be the biggest hole in my life - sorry, hee-hee, couldn't resist that!). Cynthia's observations are always insightful and I find her judgement accurate and persuasive. Perhaps it is because she is "one of us" now that her criticisms and her praise are both accepted and acceptable because one gets the sense that both her negative and her positive impressions come out of a sense of love for India and its peculiarities. Besides, she is living what most people would consider a "normal" Indian life as opposed to an inflated expatriate lifestyle (not that there's anything wrong with that except that all those expatriate observations come out of living in a bubble and are not generalizable). Anyway, Cynthia's observations of life in Bangalore strike me as authentic. And I loved reading her post about Diwali (scroll down to the November 2007 posts) with her in-law's in Lucknow. My mother is not so ritual-oriented so of course as a reaction, I have to love every form of ritual I see. And that was just priceless. Thanks, Cynthia.